Quotes About Perception

The idle mind, which demands rules, i.e. recipes for making correct sentences, and shirks the subtler task of understanding the speaker's point of view and living into his emotion will never either use or understand aspects aright. If the speaker is living into the action, sympathizing with it, he will use imperfective, if he stands outside and merely states a fact or a judgment he will instinctively use the perfective

M. Jacques Rivière appears to know no Russian and says no words of 'aspects', but what he explains as his meaning is simply this, that the Russian novel is written in the imperfective, written from within not without, lived not thought about. This modern Russian method is to M. Rivière the exact opposite of symbolist work, where everything is known beforehand, everything achieved then thought or felt about from outside and above.

Aspect or quality of a verb had, I believe, nothing originally to do with time; aspect in fact cuts clean across time. Aspect in most languages is now at least indicated for the most part by adverbs. I run — quickly; I stand — still; in this sense many verbs have hundreds of aspects.

We have seen (p. 71) that, out of the puppet or the May Queen, actually perceived year after year there arose a remembrance, a mental image, an imagined Tree Spirit, or "Summer," or Death, a thing never actually seen but conceived.

now he knows

Men are trained to discount women in any number of ways, Lydia.

We're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That's the old metaphor: You're born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude.

What I don't want is to be called an octogenarian. I saw 'Octogenarian Jane Gardam' and I thought 'Blow me!' I mean, I am, but that's not the point." (Inteview, The Guardian, 8 January 2011)

The astounding thing about Paula is that she looks like Tess of the D´Urbervilles, and she sounds like Tess of the D´Urbervilles, and she thinks like Tess of the D´Urbervilles and yet she is so different from Tess of the D´Urbervilles. I expect she comes from a different part of Dorset.

He has not the faintest idea that I am ugly and we are very happy together.

I was quite enchanted with myself. I had always thought I had very strong views on sexual morality. I found I had nothing of the kind.

But it's true, she thought, nobody really knows a thing about another's past. Why should we? Different worlds we all inhabit from the womb.

I was seeing something I didn't understand and did not want to. No I wasn't. I was seeing something I had always understood and wanted to understand better.

The idea that mothers and daughters can say everything to each other is a myth.

Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn't so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.

As Carrie Fisher once said in a film, everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humour.

Her mother was fine. Her mother was always fine. Fine was her way of saying she didn't exist.

it was part of being very young that you overestimated the lightweights with charisma.

had shocked him into speechlessness to realize that down-and-outs in New Jersey expected to have more in the way of amenities than coal miners and sharecroppers in most of West Virginia, and that people in the North believed that there was no one, anywhere, who still had to go out in the cold in the middle of the winter to use a chemical latrine.

It must be strange to keep your strong mind in a body that grows older and weaker and no longer resembles your own image of yourself.

He wore binoculars around his neck the way librarians wear their glasses.

When a man falls in love with a woman, it is like an arrow piercing the meadow; when a woman falls in love with a man, it is like grain scattered on rocks.

He had little respect for the intelligence of other people at the best of times. Now, at the worst of times, he was inclined to regard them all as morons. His fears were warranted, but not altogether for the reasons one might have supposed.

Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.